Explain how your selected story reflects this theme.

Select ONE short story from either chapter 3 or chapter 11,( see selected story below) and then select ONE of the prompts below for response in a well-organized and developed essay (minimum of 1200 words). A minimum of three scholarly sources are required, and all sources should be cited and referenced in APA format.
Often people’s perceptions of reality or of themselves differ from society’s perceptions. The theme of illusion vs. reality is common in literature. Explain how your selected story reflects this theme. What is the character’s illusion and how does he/she strive to maintain it? How does the destruction or perpetuation of the illusion develop as a theme of the story? Why do people sometimes choose a world of illusion as opposed to reality? Be sure to include and discuss various elements of fiction to develop your essay.
Setting is an important component of any story. Discuss the role that setting plays in your selected story. How is the setting integral to the story? How does the author use the setting symbolically? How does the setting reflect the characters or plot? If the story were set in your hometown in modern-day, how would the story change? What would stay the same? Be sure to include and discuss various elements of fiction to develop your essay.
In many works of literature, past events can affect, positively or negatively, the present activities, attitudes, or values of a character. Using your selected story, explain how a character(s) must contend with some aspect of the past, either personal or societal and how the character’s relationship to the past contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole. How can a person’s past serve as either a hindrance or a help for their present and future? Be sure to include and discuss various elements of fiction to develop your essay.

Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff was born in Alabama in 1945, but he was raised in the state of ­Washington. He served for four years in the army (1964–68), including a tour of duty in Vietnam. He graduated from Oxford University in 1972 and then studied creative writing at Stanford University. Wolff’s first two books were collections of short stories, In the Garden of North American Martyrs (1981) and Back in the World (1985), and both received good reviews, but he achieved greater success and acclaim with the publication of This Boy’s Life (1989), his memoir of his teenage years. He has also written a memoir of his military service, In Pharaoh’s Army (1994). The author of many short stories and two novels, his recent publications include Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (2008). From 1980 to 1997, Wolff taught courses in English and creative writing at Syracuse University, and since then he has taught at Stanford, where he is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Powder
Just before Christmas my father took me skiing at Mount Baker. He’d had to fight for the privilege of my company, because my mother was still angry with him for sneaking me into a nightclub during his last visit, to see Thelonius Monk.
He wouldn’t give up. He promised, hand on heart, to take good care of me and have me home for dinner on Christmas Eve, and she relented. But as we were checking out of the lodge that morning it began to snow, and in this snow he observed some quality that made it necessary for us to get in one last run. We got in several last runs. He was indifferent to my fretting. Snow whirled around us in bitter, blinding squalls, hissing like sand, and still we skied. As the lift bore us to the peak yet again, my father looked at his watch and said: “Criminey. This’ll have to be a fast one.”
By now I couldn’t see the trail. There was no point in trying. I stuck to him like white on rice and did what he did and somehow made it to the bottom without sailing off a cliff. We returned our skis and my father put chains on the Austin- Healy while I swayed from foot to foot, clapping my mittens and wishing I were home. I could see everything. The green tablecloth, the plates with the holly ­pattern, the red candles waiting to be lit.
We passed a diner on our way out. “You want some soup?” my father asked. I shook my head. “Buck up,” he said. “I’ll get you there. Right, doctor?”
5
I was supposed to say, “Right, doctor,” but I didn’t say anything.
A state trooper waved us down outside the resort. A pair of sawhorses were blocking the road. The trooper came up to our car and bent down to my father’s window. His face was bleached by the cold. Snowflakes clung to his eyebrows and to the fur trim of his jacket and cap.
“Don’t tell me,” my father said.
10
The trooper told him. The road was closed. It might get cleared, it might not. Storm took everyone by surprise. So much, so fast. Hard to get people moving. Christmas Eve. What can you do?
My father said: “Look. We’re talking about four, five inches. I’ve taken this car through worse than that.”
The trooper straightened up, boots creaking. His face was out of sight but I could hear him. “The road is closed.”
My father sat with both hands on the wheel, rubbing the wood with his thumbs. He looked at the barricade for a long time. He seemed to be trying to master the idea of it. Then he thanked the trooper, and with a weird, old-maidy show of caution turned the car around. “Your mother will never forgive me for this,” he said.
“We should have left before,” I said. “Doctor.”
He didn’t speak to me again until we were both in a booth at the diner, waiting for our burgers. “She won’t forgive me,” he said. “Do you understand? Never.”
“I guess,” I said, but no guesswork was required; she wouldn’t forgive him.
15
“I can’t let that happen.” He bent toward me. “I’ll tell you what I want. I want us to be all together again. Is that what you want?”
“Yes, sir.”
He bumped my chin with his knuckles. “That’s all I needed to hear.”
When we finished eating he went to the pay phone in the back of the dinner, then joined me in the booth again. I figured he’d called my mother, but he didn’t give a report. He sipped at his coffee and stared out the window at the empty road. “Come on, come on,” he said. A little while later he said, “Come on!” When the trooper’s car went past, lights flashing, he got up and dropped some money on the check. “O.K. Vámanos.”
The wind had died. The snow was falling straight down, less of it now; lighter. We drove away from the resort, right up to the barricade. “Move it,” my father told me. When I looked at him he said, “What are you waiting for?” I got out and dragged one of the sawhorses aside, then put it back after he drove through. He pushed the door open for me. “Now you’re an accomplice,” he said. “We go down together.” He put the car into gear and gave me a look. “Joke, doctor.”
20
“Funny, doctor.”
Down the first long stretch I watched the road behind us, to see if the trooper was on our tail. The barricade vanished. Then there was nothing but snow: snow on the road, snow kicking up from the chains, snow on the trees, snow in the sky; and our trail in the snow. I faced around and had a shock. The lie of the road behind us had been marked by our own tracks, but there were no tracks ahead of us. My father was breaking virgin snow between a line of tall trees. He was humming “Stars Fell on Alabama.” I felt snow brush along the floorboards under my feet. To keep my hands from shaking, I clamped them between my knees.
My father grunted in a thoughtful way and said, “Don’t ever try this yourself.”
“I won’t.”
“That’s what you say now, but someday you’ll get your license and then you’ll think you can do anything. Only you won’t be able to do this. You need, I don’t know—a certain instinct.”
25
“Maybe I have it.”
“You don’t. You have your strong points, but not . . . this. I only mention it, because I don’t want you to get the idea this is something just anybody can do. I’m a great driver. That’s not a virtue, O.K.? It’s just a fact, and one you should be aware of. Of course you have to give the old heap some credit, too—there aren’t many cars I’d try this with. Listen!”
I listened. I heard the slap of the chains, the stiff, jerky rasps of the wipers, the purr of the engine. It really did purr. The car was almost new. My father couldn’t afford it, and kept promising to sell it, but here it was.
I said, “Where do you think that policeman went to?”
“Are you warm enough?” He reached over and cranked up the blower. Then he turned off the wipers. We didn’t need them. The clouds had brightened. A few sparse, feathery flakes drifted into our slipstream and were swept away. We left the trees and entered a broad field of snow that ran level for a while and then tilted sharply downward. Orange stakes had been planted at intervals in two parallel lines and my father steered a course between them, though they were far enough apart to leave considerable doubt in my mind as to where exactly the road lay. He was humming again, doing little scat riffs around the melody.
30
“O.K. then. What are my strong points?”
“Don’t get me started,” he said. “It’d take all day.”
“Oh, right. Name one.”
“Easy. You always think ahead.”
True. I always thought ahead. I was a boy who kept his clothes on numbered hangers to insure proper rotation. I bothered my teachers for homework assignments far ahead of their due dates so I could make up schedules. I thought ahead, and that was why I knew that there would be other troopers waiting for us at the end of our ride, if we got there. What I did not know was that my father would wheedle and plead his way past them—he didn’t sing “O Tannenbaum”1 but just about—and get me home for dinner, buying a little more time before my mother decided to make the split final. I knew we’d get caught; I was resigned to it. And maybe for this reason I stopped moping and began to enjoy myself.
1 “O Tannenbaum” a German song known in English as “O Christmas Tree.”
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Why not? This was one for the books. Like being in a speedboat, but better. You can’t go downhill in a boat. And it was all ours. And it kept coming, the laden trees, the unbroken surface of snow, the sudden white vistas. Here and there I saw hints of the road, ditches, fences, stakes, but not so many that I could have found my way. But then I didn’t have to. My father was driving. My father in his 48th year, rumpled, kind, bankrupt of honor, flushed with certainty. He was a great driver. All persuasion, no coercion. Such subtlety at the wheel, such tactful pedalwork. I actually trusted him. And the best was yet to come—the switchbacks and hairpins. Impossible to describe. Except maybe to say this: If you haven’t driven fresh ­powder, you haven’t driven.
[1992]

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